


Make Your Own

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-06
Updated: 2006-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:44:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Lyrics and title from Bruce Springsteen’s "Lucky Town."</p>
    </blockquote>





	Make Your Own

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics and title from Bruce Springsteen’s "Lucky Town."

_House got too crowded, clothes got too tight  
And I don’t know just where I’m going tonight  
Out where the sky’s been cleared by a good hard rain  
There’s somebody callin’ my secret name_

Kara’s mother hadn’t set foot in a temple since the day her daughter was named before the Gods. She didn’t like priests and she didn’t like anything that hinted of mystery. After a while, she didn’t like her husband very much, either, and by the time he wasn’t her husband anymore, anything that reminded her of his quiet faith or the rolling bars of his music would fill her with bitter fury.

Kara, possessed of a contrary nature from the day of her birth under Aries’ star, loved the temple.

She loved the order and eternity of it, the idea that there would always be incense and candles, that on any day at any hour she could kneel there and sing a hymn of praise and know that the Gods would hear her.

She liked the priests, too, for the most part; every temple seemed have at least one who would smile at her endless questions, show her the steps to the sacred dances, or teach her to gaze into a flame or a mirror and find divinity.

One or two over the years even suggested that she take holy orders, which made her laugh out loud, a rough and bright sound like a wild bird set loose in the still air of the sanctuary. She loved the peace of the temple, but as a respite from her life, not as its entirety. She needed fire and light and noise around her before she could stand the cool silence here. Besides, she was going into the Fleet, and she would make rank twice as fast as her mother.

She did agree that she wanted to stand before the Gods and confirm her faith and humility. She’d take a name of mystery, drink from Athena’s cup and bow her head to the weight of Hera’s will across her shoulders. A week after her fourteenth birthday, she put on a white silk dress hand-woven on Tauron. She’d told her father that was all she wanted for a present, on one of their hurried Netphone talks that only happened when her mother remembered to turn the thing on. She told him that she wanted a white dress and a recording of his last concert, if he could manage it. She hadn’t expected anything so expensive or lovely, hadn’t known how to feel at the touch of it on her skin.

The ceremony was always by moonlight, and Kara’s mother locked every door in the house at sunset. She had to go out the window and down a tree, streaking dirt up the side of the dress in the process. So she wouldn’t stand and speak her devotions looking pure and unmarked by evil thought or deed; well, the Gods knew her better than that anyway.

The soldier on gate duty was a buddy who bought her contraband cigarettes and hated her mother with the cordial and respectful passion that only a subordinate officer could manage. He let her off the base without a question and with a catcall for the dress, and she told him he could go frak himself and his brother with their grandfather’s prick, if the goat would hold still long enough.

Then she ran up the street to the temple and gave her eternal soul to the Gods.

 _Had a coat of fine leather and snakeskin boots  
But that coat always had a thread hangin’ loose  
Well I pulled it one night and to my surprise  
It led me right past your house and on over the rise_

“We’ve got new kids tonight,” Blackout called as he swaggered into the bar. “ _Ba_ -bies. Let’s give ‘em a real good welcome.”

Kara laughed and looked over her glass at the row of wide-eyed little nuggets following the pilot into their first real honest-to-the-Gods Fleet bar. They didn’t know where to look first, poor children. Fresh out of basic and wouldn’t even start their flight training till the morning—and they’d start it with hangovers, was the plan as far as she could see. Blackout was such as asshole sometimes.

Not that she wouldn’t help. Officers had to stick together.

“Do mine eyes deceive me?” Blackout shouted as he steered the nuggets across the room. “The great Starbuck, neither on punishment nor in hack on her night off? Is the statue of Athena at Delphi weeping blood tonight, because I’ve heard that’s supposed to happen in times of miracles.”

“Give me an hour,” she said, baring her teeth in a feral smile at the nuggets just to see them jump. One or two didn’t, and she made note of them—those might actually have the ‘nads to make it. Flinching was failure, in her experience. “Where’d you find these puppies, Blackout?”

“They’ll let anything through basic these days, Kara my love,” he drawled, sitting down beside her. “I’ll buy you a drink in exchange for your Triad cards. I’ve gotta make pilots of ‘em the old-fashioned way. Would you believe it, the one there on the end’s never played before?”

The kid in question—skinny, big teeth, eyes like the sky over the test fields out in the desert—just shrugged when she turned and laughed at him. “My mother didn’t think it was a game for nice boys,” he said.

Blackout hooted and slapped Kara on the back. “I guess that means you’re not a nice girl, huh, Starbuck?”

“I could’ve told you that just looking at her,” the kid shot back. The other nuggets all went white and shook harder than they already were. Kara showed her teeth again as she finished off the rest of her drink. So the kid was cocky; she’d been called that herself once or twice or a thousand times. It meant that she had the ammo to shoot him down.

“Hell of a way to speak to an officer,” she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears. Let him get a good look at her face, so he could think about it when he was doing push-ups until he collapsed.

He raised an eyebrow, skeptical, looking her up and down from taped-together boots to oversized coat she’d fished from a trash bin, checking for the first indication of rank and finding none. “You’re an officer?”

“She’s your _flight_ instructor,” Blackout crowed, one wrong breath away from choking on his drink. “And boy, are you frakked now. I hope you like cleaning latrines, Adama.”

”I guess I can’t hold it against him, I’m off-duty. Appearances can be deceiving, huh? I’ve won a lot of bets over the years off that little saying.” She waited for relief to light up those blue eyes before she went on. “But I can make him stake me for the first round of Triad, and buy a round for the house.”

Kid had the balls to laugh, before he reached for his wallet. She liked that—laugh first and get pissed off later, she always thought, except when she forgot. She was going to have fun with this Adama--the ID card in the wallet declared his given name as Zak. That suited him about as well as his uniform, which was probably better than hers did.

 _Ten minutes in the simulator,_ she thought as she started to deal the cards. _I’ll break that one in half._

 _I had some victory that was just failure in deceit  
Now the joke’s comin’ up through the soles of my feet  
I been a long time walking on fortune’s cane  
Tonight I’m steppin’ lightly and feelin’ no pain_

Helena Cain wasn’t a mystery to Kara. Not even close; she was every stiff-necked hard-eyed officer who let a little rank suck all the fun right out of them. Kara had known a list of those, beginning with her mother and running all the way to Colonel Tigh, with a footnote for the silently fuming captain beside her, who had high potential for full membership if she wasn’t around to tweak his cables now and then.

“It’s a bunch of crap,” Lee said as he opened his locker and started jamming stuff into his duffel bag. “You know that, right? Total crap.”

“It’s mind games,” she said, swinging her own locker open and surveying the odds and ends of her life. “We just have to make it clear that we’re not going to be played. Give it three days, Lee, Cain will be begging to send us home.”

He snorted. “Give it three days and you’ll be so deep in the brig, you’ll never see daylight again.” The words hung in the air like ugly symbols of things lost; Lee made a face. “Figure of speech,” he muttered, slamming the locker and stepping away. “I’ve got to finish up a few more pieces of paperwork or whoever they get to be CAG next’ll curse me to the Gods. I’ll see you on deck in ten.”

She waved at him to get a move on and _go_ already, and turned back to her bag, which was only half-full even though the locker was empty. She’d never been much of a collector. What was the point? Stuff didn’t prove anything, skill did. Having the most toys just slowed you down.

She liked speed. Viper from the launching tube, lunge across the Pyramid court, the dart of pulse and dizzy adrenaline burst when the Triad stakes went up. The dead were still, the living had to move.

Cain knew a little too well how to be still. She stood and watched and pounced like a reptile, like one of the giant lizards on Cancero. Kara liked tigers better; at least that lashing tail gave you some warning.

Cain held still and expected the world to bend around her. Just like those other officers Kara had known. Well, she could try it. Kara Thrace didn’t bend for anybody, not ever.

She knew what Lee would suggest—fly under the radar, play the game, work the system. Frak that. Lee didn’t know anything about this type. If Cain had gotten him when he was a little younger, she could have molded him into a perfect little monster. She could probably still manage to warp him now, if he wasn’t careful and didn’t have Kara to watch his back.

She slammed her locker and stepped back. Frak _all_ of it. She wasn’t going to pretend to be anything but Starbuck. Nothing but the best. Give her half a chance, she’d look Cain in the eye and tell her so.

 _Well here’s to your good looks, baby, now here’s to my health  
Here’s to the loaded places that we take ourselves  
When it comes to luck you make your own  
Tonight I got dirt on my hands but I’m building me a new home_

She tried to explain Vipers to Helo once. He was a fine ECO, an excellent Triad player, a good drinking buddy and a great lay, but he didn’t have much of an imagination. And he didn’t have any interest at all in learning how to _really_ fly.

“Not even gravity can hold you down,” she told him, gesturing with her cigar. “You can break _every_ rule.”

He laughed at her, rolling one of those damn lollipops around his tongue. “I think the laws of physics still apply.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut and pulling the feeling up out of her memory—her heart and her soul and the bottoms of her feet. Flying filled her up and animated her and turned Kara into _Starbuck_ , like the Gods bringing life out of air. “Not when you’re out there.”

He laughed again and shook his head. “I’ll take your word for it.”

She had to punch him then, a solid smack to the shoulder, and he just laughed at her one more time and held his hands up in surrender.

That was before the attack, when things made sense, when she could run through Galactica and know each and every face she would see, when and where on her circuit, and every sound the deck would make under her feet. When she could close her eyes in her bunk and ask herself _What do you hear?_ and get an answer of _Nothing but the rain_ instead of weeping for the dead.

Flying away from Galactica now felt wrong, even more so than leaving Caprica had. She’d been leaving Anders and a righteous fight and a well of answered questions, there. Now she was leaving everything _else_ —what she had to call family, what she had to call home, the place where she’d cut away the burned and rebuilt the broken after losing Zak. The core of her was the same; the Gods had made that, she’d had it always, and it would endure on Pegasus or in purgatory or anywhere.

She just didn’t _want_ to give up the rest of it, the parts that were woven with the steel of that weary old ship. She didn’t see why she should have to, and so she wouldn’t, come hell or hard vacuum.

Cain thought she could make Kara Thrace behave if she closed all the doors and made the expectations of her rank into a cage. She didn’t know who she was dealing with. Kara would just smile, salute, and leave through the window.  



End file.
